Text 20307, 77 rader
Skriven 2009-02-01 09:54:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: okay okay 160
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So it's cold, and I've been evicted to this friend of a
friend's house, but I haven't checked to see if she's a
vegetarian and don't feel comfortable cooking meat in
a veggie's pots and pans ...

I check OpenTable and iDine to see if I can't feed myself
and my frequent flyer accounts at the same time, and, bingo,
there are like 5 OpenTable places and 10 iDine places all
within a ten-minute walk ... and one that's both, the
sillily named Grill from Ipanema. I make my OpenTable
ressie and hotfoot it out there, where at 1 pm the place is
dead empty, despite the advertised $18.95 special, which
includes salad, main, dessert, and a glass of Champers. Okay,
there are four customers - three at the bar, drooling at
Giada on the telly (and not at her body - it's definitely a
girly man bar), and one at a table, but he's not eating,
just drinking things in no apparent order, first water, then
a cup of coffee, then a caipirinha.

So I get the menu, and most of the things on the bruncheon
special look made to order, and I figure, is there a cook
in the back? probably not. And am I going to trust the busboy
or owner or apprentice or whoever there is in the back to
make my steak with onions or fried chicken? Nao. So I go with
simple: salad, feijoada, rice pudding.

The salad comes out with nice crisp greens, nice crisp
cucumber, nice crisp fresh-sliced red onion, nice crisp tomato,
all nicely arranged, in a mustard and garlic vinaigrette. Nice.

Bread rolls are brown 'n' serve sourdough but very good.

The feijoada, ah. First a big plate of collards and rice and
farofa. Then a little dish of orange slices. Then a kettle of
soupy purple black beans with unidentified naughty pig bits.

The collards are heavily garlicked, al dente, absolutely
delicious. Some of the best. Rice, though done about right,
is way too salty, especially as the stew is expected to be
kind of salty. The farofa is just like beach sand, not nearly
so pleasant as, say, at Fire Bull, where one of the Clam Crawl
dinners was held.

Okay. You ladle the stew over the rice, a few tablespoons
at a time, sprinkle with the farofa (which I guess serves the
same purpose as the breadcrumb crust in a cassoulet), and eat.
Okay, here's some sausage, kind of mushy, but I expect that,
as clearly this was yesterday's stew, as I was counting on
it to be, because after a day's sitting, as with most similar
dishes, it's better. Here's some more sausage, even mushier -
of course, on further inspection, it's morcela, blood pudding.
And a chunk of pig cheek, yum. Smoked shoulder, a little tough
but tasty. And la (or should it be le?) piece de resistance -
was it chosen just for me? A whole pig penis, cooked tender
and almost falling apart, but quite distinguishable. Well,
thank you, what's that supposed to mean? Anyhow, it tastes
like any other pig part, so down it goes. The rest of the
stuff, a couple chunks of fat, a rib or two, is more normal.
The beans, good, well done, almost falling apart. And the
stew, miracle of miracles, not too salty.

"Champagne" - some badly stored Cava, probably Cordoniu
or something like that, quite oxidized, but not horrible to
taste and better with the meal than a good wine would be.

It's not the waitress who stops by to ask how things were
(fine), but the proprietress, a cutish woman of about my age,
who sports an odd smirk. H'm. I don't put two and two
together fast enough, though, so pay the bill and out I go.

Oh, the rice pudding, I forgot about that, that was nasty.
Half-uncooked rice in cinnamon water. There was enough dairy
in it to grep me but not enough to taste good.

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